Nebraska – Page 2 – Birding New Jersey

March 22, 2015March 22, 2015

Woodcock and Gulls

My Nebraska tour is off to a great start — and with a great group, which makes me look forward even more to the rest of the week.

We started yesterday afternoon with some waterfowl watching near the airport, relishing close-up views of lesser scaup and redheads. I’d been worried that the fancy gulls of the day before might be gone, but sure enough, one of the first we saw on approaching the bleak marina at Dodge Park was an adult lesser black-backed gull, squabbling with the abundant ring-billed gulls over surprisingly large but obviously tasty dead fish. The day’s first bald eagles were here, too, perched impassive over the whole scene.

After an early supper at La Mesa, we moved across to Lake Manawa, where many thousands of gulls were streaming in to roost. Another adult lesser black-backed joined the flock, and most of us caught at least glimpses of three or four Franklin’s gulls out there in the horde; I’m hoping for more and closer views of this most handsome of North American larids.

The coloring of the skies reminded us that it would soon be woodcock time. We took our places in a traditionally good spot and watched the creatures of the night emerge, among them a few white-tailed deer and what I imagine will turn out to be the tour’s first great horned owl. Promptly at eight came the first nearby buzzings, and a few minutes later half a dozen birds were peenting and skydancing all around us. Several flashed right through the group as they took off in display flight — happily, no puncture wounds from the big-nosed lovebirds.

Best of all? Standing in the evening light without a coat. Spring on the Great Plains: you can never tell!

March 20, 2015March 20, 2015

Lesser Black-backed Gulls, Ho Hum?

Not that long ago, a lesser black-backed gull was red-letter news in eastern Nebraska. No more: this snazzy adult was only one of two individuals at N.P. Dodge Park this afternoon. The other was the first first-cycle bird I’d seen in the state (and even less obliging in matters photographic).

Plenty of bald eagles out there, too, but disappointingly low waterfowl numbers.

Our tour begins tomorrow, and if these gulls stick around, it will be a great start.

Too late for this year, but join me next March for cranes, sharp-tailed grouse, and greater prairie-chickens in one of North America’s hidden birding paradises.

May 12, 2014

Blackbird Hill

It was 171 years ago today that John James Audubon, Edward Harris, Isaac Sprague, John Bell, Lewis Squires, and their crew tied their boat on the Iowa side of the Missouri River, across from the “famed bluff” known as Blackbird Hill.

Audubon’s bird list from the immediate area is more or less identical to what one might tally on a good morning’s birding today: Canada geese, mallards, wood ducks, bank swallows, Blackburnian and golden-winged warblers, yellow-headed blackbirds, and Lincoln’s sparrows were all seen or shot by the party — apparently all on the east bank of the river — between Wood’s Hill and Blackbird, landmarks on the Nebraska shore in what is now Burt County.

When I was in the fourth grade, I had a teacher named Edith Newton. Mrs. Newton had gone to school with my maternal grandmother and taught my mother, and then, in the early 1970s, she was my teacher for science and “social studies.” Only now do I realize, more and more with each passing year, how richly Mrs. Newton combined (and sometimes conflated) her academic subjects — and how much of an influence her fusing of science and history had on even a seven-year-old me.

Mrs. Newton was the first birder I knew. She taught us grade schoolers our first scientific names (can you imagine that today?), and introduced us — in the classroom — to the common birds and the early scientists and explorers who had studied them, including Audubon, who spent the night of May 9, 1843, in our town.

She also told us the story of Blackbird — the romantic version, of course. And she did not leave out the macabre tale of George Catlin’s grave robbing, whereby in 1832, with “a little pains” and the help of a pocket gopher, he stole the head of the Omaha and “secreted it” with the other skulls he gathered on his travels.

I don’t know whether Blackbird’s remains — one of more than 4,000 native skulls once held by the Smithsonian — have been returned to the Omaha yet.

Looking back from nearly two centuries’ distance, it’s obvious that that struggle was essentially over by the time Audubon and his friends ascended the Missouri in May 1843. Where Lewis and Clark had raised a flag in tribute to “the deceased king,” Catlin took a shovel to his grave; where Catlin had seen great herds of buffalo on the prairies, Audubon’s boat dodged bloated cattle floating downstream from the new settlements in Dakota. The Omaha, Audubon said, “looked as destitute and as hungry as if they had not eaten for a week.” They probably hadn’t.

Blackbird died in 1800. Audubon died in 1851. Edith Newton must have been born just about exactly halfway between Audubon’s death and my own birth, now more than half a century ago (how’d that happen, anyhow?). Books and stories and anecdotes and, yes, lies passed down from age to age still make me feel a part of it all.

But I’m sad that nowadays Catlin’s scurrilous “collecting” seems to have tainted the entire history of Blackbird, his life and his burial. Elementary school students in Nebraska don’t learn about Blackbird Hill anymore, depriving them of an opportunity to talk about biological warfare and economic co-optation in the ultimately one-sided struggle for the Great Plains.